Secure Communication Within Networks

Abstract:

Security is playing a more and more important role in everyday computing. Be it file encryption, securely accessing websites (SSL) or securing ones own hardware, IT security is becoming an important factor both for consumers and companies alike. While secure communication has been an issue since the existence of human civilization, more recently, the NSA surveillance crisis has brought this topic to the masses again and public interest in secure communication technology is steadily increasing.

Securing communication over the internet or other networks is an especially hard task: There have been countless attempts in the past to secure network traffic. Some of these are now standardized and widespread, while others have been abandoned long ago. What most of these technologies have in common is that they are not universal – they are only intended for specific usage scenarios. They may also feature security weaknesses or may be hard to implement.

The goal of this thesis is to present three very different solutions:

DNS Tunneling

Mesh Networking

The TOR Network

The thesis will describe these solutions in detail, show usage cases, and then evaluate them in terms of security and reliability. It will also compare these solutions with each other and explain, when which solution may be used.